


A Visit Paid

by illwynd



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, One Night Stands, SCIENCE!, Violence, tricksterishness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-31
Updated: 2013-08-31
Packaged: 2017-12-25 05:27:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/949141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illwynd/pseuds/illwynd
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thor has been gone for a couple of years, and although Jane is still hard at work trying to find the secrets to the bridge to get back to him, when she meets a handsome and interested guy at a scientific conference, she takes the opportunity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Visit Paid

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by a Norsekink prompt asking for Loki winning the fight on the bifrost and later making good on his threats about going to pay Jane a visit and then taunting Thor with what he’d done. When I read that my brain said “wait no that’s not how it goes.” This is what my brain said instead.
> 
> Originally posted on [my tumblr](http://illwynd.tumblr.com/post/59850444326/um-dont-ask-me-about-this-okay-idek-but-i-have).

Standing at the head of the conference hall—not one of the little discussion rooms downstairs, but the actual _ballroom_ , packed with hundreds of chairs and people and rustling papers and shining plastic badges—Jane rubbed her fingers across the little piece of metal in her suit pocket.

She’d fought for this. She’d used up every bit of leverage she had, threatening to pull her data out of SHIELD’s hands and quit her contract—and damn the consequences, she could ruin their day before they could ruin hers—if they hadn’t let her at least go public with the theory. It was important work, and she was a scientist, and the way science happened was that you speculated and studied and tested and tore out your hair and eventually, if you were lucky, you got a chance like this. And then other people, other minds, could follow you, take what you’d discovered and do even greater things with it.  So she’d fought for this, and now she was here.

She could feel pink spots cropping up on her cheeks and a trickle of sweat down her arms, probably leaving embarrassing damp spots on the thin, flimsy fabric of her blouse under the blazer—swear to God, her wardrobe was mostly t-shirts for a reason—and making her even more conscious of how nervous she was. It was a long time since she’d given a presentation to this many people. And that had been just a TA lecture to bored undergrads. This was different. This was everything she’d discovered, everything she’d worked her butt off to find out for her whole career—everything she’d been chasing, everything that had literally fallen out of the sky at her feet for her to try, desperately, to understand.

Reluctantly she let go of the little hammer-shaped charm (a present from Erik; he’d shaken his head and said he shouldn’t, but maybe she’d want it) and took a deep breath, instead rearranging the notes on the podium in front of her.

She’d never forget that night. The swirling, flickering aurora, like a storm overhead, the man (god? alien?) falling to Earth, falling into her life and changing it forever, the bolt of brilliant light that came down with him in the middle of the desert, leaving intricate patterns behind, a cryptographer’s masterpiece, a spinning delirium of graceful lines flash-burned into the dusty ground. It’d all led her here.

And he was gone, but she was still holding out hope. She was doing more than that; she wasn’t just hoping. She was trying to find her way to him, to Asgard. “A place where magic and science are one and the same,” he’d told her, on a clear night under the New Mexico sky. His smile, his warmth and willingness to share with her what he knew, the fleeting tactile impression of the strokes of his pen as he drew a picture of the universe for her… she could almost still feel all of it, where it’d set up residence in her chest somewhere, a subtle little wobble that was there even when she got tired or frustrated. It was all out there, everything she wanted to understand. He was out there. And all she had to do was… make it through this conference and get back to work, knowing that her contribution was there, no matter what happened.

She took another deep breath and smiled and began her talk, and her eyes scanned the room without seeing, clicking through the first few slides almost on autopilot. Once she got into it, her nerves started to calm down. Her mouth remembered what to do, her hands gesturing and her mannerisms slipping into the professional, scholarly, take-me-seriously things that you learn how to do when you’re a 5’2” woman in an old boys’ club like astrophysics.

She remembered how to do this. It wasn’t so bad.

She was halfway through the presentation before she noticed him. Or, really, noticed that she’d already noticed him, that her eyes had been unconsciously drawn to where he was sitting. It was, more or less, the portion of the room where she habitually not-really-focused her gaze between alert-looking sweeps of all the other heads that she hoped would react well to her conclusions. He was practically burned into her retinas by the time she realized.

Pale, really pale, even under the dimmed house lights, with black hair and sharp, regal-looking cheekbones. Her age or thereabouts. As he shifted in his chair under her gaze it was to put one pensive finger to his chin and smile.

She didn’t stumble. It was an encouraging smile, a smile that had paid attention to her every word and now said “Yes? Please, do tell me the rest.” It was above all a fascinated smile, and one that grasped her theories as soon as she got the words out. There wasn’t any dismissal in it, no polite doubt. A few questions, maybe, but curious rather than skeptical. It was the face all the books on giving speeches told you to look for: friendly and welcoming, so that you could imagine you were just talking to them and ignore everyone else who was yawning or fiddling with conference schedules or planning a few snide remarks for the Q&A.

It was not until a couple hours later when he appeared next to her at the hotel bar, after she’d wrapped up her presentation and felt good about it but grateful to have it over with, that she realized it was also a very good-looking face.

“Your work is brilliant, Ms. Foster,” he said as he approached, some bright green drink in his hand. She supposes she must have frowned, though, because the next moment he was apologizing. “I’m sorry… I attended your presentation today and I was hoping to ask you a few questions that didn’t make it into the session. But please tell me if I’m intruding.”

She shook her head and held out her hand to him.

He introduced himself. Lukas some-unpronounceable-last-name, and… while the physics club isn’t exactly tiny, she was a little surprised that it wasn’t a name she’d ever heard. She supposed her question must have shown on her face, because he was giving her another smile—a hesitant one this time, tipping his head in a vague shrug. “I’m not really in the field. More an interested amateur. But I am very interested.”

They stared at each other for a minute while she wondered if this was the sort of thing that Coulson or the other agents who’d grilled her on what she would be talking about would have considered suspicious. Then she decided that she hadn’t fought for the chance to release her findings and talk about it with the scientific community only to shut herself up when someone wanted to listen.

 “I’m sorry, yes,” she said, shaking herself out of it and gesturing at the seat beside her. “I’d be happy to talk about my theories. Love to, actually.”

*

They were still there when the bartender started pushing a rag around and flipping chairs up onto the tables, and the conversation gave no real sign of drawing to a close.

He’d wanted to know everything. He’d asked quiet questions about the physics, got her scribbling equations on a notepad while he huddled close to her side, _hmm_ ing and _ahh_ ing. And she’d tried to answer everything, at least where she could. The deal she’d made was that SHIELD would let her speak publicly about her discoveries… just as long as she left out the part about how she’d discovered it that involved interdimensional aliens who considered themselves gods. It had seemed a reasonable balance to strike, even given the several-pages-long list Coulson had handed her of details that were not and should not be made public. (She thought she might have stuck a copy in her briefcase, but she might also have forgotten it at home. “Nothing about aliens, check. I think I can manage that at a scientific conference,” she’d muttered to herself at the time.)

Some of the questions Lukas asked, though, in his soft-spoken way, almost startled her. He had asked if she had any guesses what such a phenomenon as her not-just-theoretical bridge might look like, and it’d almost slipped out before she could stop herself, covering it with a tense little laugh.

“You know,” she said, “I’m not sure, but it’d have to be impressive, wouldn’t it?”

He’d smiled in response, his green eyes gleaming, and his hand toyed with his empty glass as a distraction, dregs slipping around the bottom.

“It must be so amazing,” he said, “to have such ideas. The metaphorical bolt of lightning out of the clear blue sky—and yet for such a thing to occur there must be ionization in the atmosphere already, simply waiting for the right moment, mustn’t there?” His tongue swept across his lower lip as he met her gaze. “So where does that energy come from? I have always been curious about that.”

And even someone who spent more time with books and computers than people could realize that he was, well, interested. And, she realized, so was she. He was fascinated with her, and there was no denying that it felt good, recognition and acknowledgement and those sorts of feelings that she hadn’t quite been able to admit were part of why she had pushed so hard for the conference. It felt good. And maybe, also, it didn’t hurt that she’d gotten… lonely.  

She and Thor had only known each other for a few days, but it was long enough to know that, for every reason, she wanted to find him again. And since he’d disappeared in a flash of blinding, swirling colors, she’d been too busy with her research, and she hadn’t met anyone else she had even thought about dating. She’d been… sort of… waiting. She hadn’t even called Don for an instantly regrettable hookup since then.

So she’d been alone for a couple years. She’d spent all her time working on her research and hoping that he’d be at the end of the tunnel, too. And she hadn’t given up hope. The conference was proof of that. But on the other hand… it had been long enough that she’d started thinking about how she’d deal if it never happened. They hadn’t really had any claim on each other; for all Jane knew, Thor could have already moved on. So maybe what she wanted was just to try it out, to see how it would feel for her to move on, too, if it came to that.  

And Lukas seemed perfect. She would never see him again after tonight, probably, and there was no danger at all of getting wires crossed with her feelings for Thor, because Lukas was nothing like him. He wasn’t big, blond, and hunky with generous puppy-dog eyes. He was instead slim and polite and handsome, with a clever smile and perfectly tended hair, and while Jane couldn’t claim to know enough about fashion to know how to describe the sleek black suit he wore, it looked about a hundred times better than anything else people were wearing at a physics conference in Dallas.

Not to mention that there was something undeniably intoxicating about his obvious captivation with what she had to say that definitely could not all be chalked up to her third rum and Coke.

He threw a casual glance over his shoulder just then, though, and turned back to her with a soft frown dragging the perfect ink line of his eyebrow down in regret. “I think they’re kicking us out,” he said, standing and making a move to draw another bill from his pocket to cover a healthy tip. “So… I appreciate how much of your time you’ve already given me, and you can be sure you’ve given me plenty to think about. Good night, Jane Foster. Perhaps we’ll run into each other again.”

Her tongue stuck in her mouth, but he hadn’t gone two steps before she overcame it. “Wait. Are you… are you staying in this hotel?” she asked. “Because I am. If you wanted to, um, continue our conversation?”

He smiled. “I’d love to.”

It would obviously be just a fling. She didn’t know where he was from, but even if it was around here, she wasn’t. And while he was quick-witted and grasped her theories intuitively and was an amazingly good listener, she wasn’t looking for a boyfriend. (Or, at least, she was only looking for _one_ boyfriend in particular.) But he was interested, and he looked really good in that suit, and it’d been a while.

By the time they got up to her floor, she’d decided that she was definitely going to go for it with him.

By the time they closed the door of her room behind them, she was again glad that he didn’t remind her of Thor at all. In fact, the only point of similarity was that Lukas was just about as tall as Thor, which made things awkward, but they managed to meet somewhere in the middle.

And whatever the green stuff was that’d been in his glass down in the bar, it’d left his mouth tasting like cinnamon, spicy and a little sweet. She liked it.

*

It was a day and a half later, when she was back in her own lab and in her own jeans, a bowl of cereal getting soggy as she leafed through a few papers she’d brought back from the conference, that the thunder started.

Jane had gotten in the habit of thinking of him when there were storms, mostly just because the books she’d read about him had said so, but also because it fit. A summer storm, warm and crackling with energy, enough to make you want to dance around in the heavy drops at midnight because the air is hot and the steam is coming up off the street. That was Thor, and Jane hoped she’d figure out the bridge soon.

She hadn’t gotten Lukas’s number. She hadn’t been aware when he left, slipping out, she guessed, in the early hours of the morning. She’d smelled him on the hotel sheets, though, and… well, it was probably a good thing he’d gone. She’d liked him. She’d liked him a lot, and she could almost still feel his arm under her back, holding her against him as they fucked.

The last time, just before she’d decided that _she_ was exhausted even if he wasn’t, he’d kissed her, and when they’d separated he’d had this sad look in his eyes, and she hadn’t been able to stop herself from asking what was wrong.

He’d given a breathy laugh, pausing on his elbows. “I… I’ve done many things that I thought would make me happy. None of it has ended where I would have imagined. Yet I keep doing it… I can’t seem to do otherwise.”

She hadn’t known what to say, and she’d patted him a little, awkwardly. A moment later he’d shaken his head.

“Sorry. You don’t want to hear that. Sorry.”

He’d lowered his lips to hers in further soft apology, and she had let it go.

But now she was thinking about it as the thunder tore apart the sky, thinking about it so deeply that the sudden pounding on her door almost gave her a heart attack.

And it only got worse when she saw who it was.

It was Thor.

It was Thor, steaming from the desert heat in the rain. It was Thor, in dark and ragged clothes that looked like he’d been wearing them for years and that left his arms bare but clung to his torso, ripped in places, threadbare and worn. There were cuts on his wrists, pale raw marks that looked like he’d been chained. There were smears of red everywhere—blood? Could that be blood? Jane’s pulse pounded at the thought.

The worst, though, was the look on his face.

“Jane,” he said, his voice a disused rasp. “Jane, you are…”

He practically fell into her arms, and that was a strange feeling, trying to comfort someone who’s a foot taller and sobbing like a baby.

She patted him on the back as he held tight, hoping it was reassuring. “Yeah, I’m… fine,” she said. And it was all so strange that, no matter how much she had missed him, it was obvious there were bigger things to worry about. “What’s happened? Thor?”

“Forgive me, Jane.” She almost couldn’t make out the muffled words against her shoulder, but she felt his lips moving. “I brought this upon you. He only came after you because of me, to hurt _me_. Forgive me, you must forgive me, I have already taken vengeance for you…”

She got her arms between them and pried them apart so she could _see_ him. “Thor, I’m fine. Nothing’s happened. Talk to me, tell me what’s going on.”

He was staring at her, and there were even splatters of blood on his face. He rubbed at one of his wrists, where the skin was chafed raw and marred with cuts in bright, bloody lines. “My brother. Loki. He said he had come to Midgard. He said he found you, and… and that he…”

All at once Jane’s face felt like it was burning. All at once, she had a terrible feeling that she understood. But she had to be sure.

“Thor, what does your brother look like?” she asked.

Tall and thin. Pale. Black hair. Green eyes. Thor answered without taking his eyes off her, clinging to her for whatever answers would come.  

The only way was to do it like a band-aid. To get it over with faster.

“He was here,” she said.

Thor’s shoulders slumped and his sigh was a ragged, wretched thing.

“But he didn’t hurt me,” Jane added quickly. “It was… It wasn’t like that.”

Over the next hour as he sat on her couch, crumpling up tissue after tissue until there was a pile of the soaked things on the carpet at his feet, she managed to piece together the whole terrible story.

“He promised he would pay you a visit. He threatened it even then,” Thor said, as he told her how he’d lost the fight upon his return to Asgard.

She stared at his hands twisting in his lap, the ruddy shackle-marks bright on his wrists, as he told her how his brother had come to his cell every day, telling him how he had killed their father and taken the throne and sent their mother away. Telling him how he meant to darken their world, just out of spite. Grabbing him by the hair and demanding to know what had changed him.

She swallowed her dread into the cold emptiness of her stomach as his shoulders slumped forward and his massive hands rose to cover his face as he told her how Loki had come to the cell that day, laughing and wild-eyed as a drunk or a madman, saying he’d done what he’d threatened to do.

“He told me things he should not have known, unless he’d really done it. He said he made you scream,” Thor choked out. He dabbed a tissue across his eyes then, looked down and saw that it had picked up a few droplets of blood from his face. A shudder quaked through him. “He made me think he’d killed you.” More tears leaked from the corners of his eyes, with no sign of stopping.

Jane didn’t dare to ask what he had done in vengeance. She had an awful feeling she already knew.

All she could do was hold his hand for comfort, unable to think of anything useful to say, anything that would help at all. At one point she had the embarrassing, selfish thought that this wasn’t what she had imagined their reunion would be like, but it was washed away by a sudden memory of the taste of cinnamon on Lukas’s tongue and how he’d kissed his way down her body in tender exploration, and now it was all terrible, sour in her stomach, because she knew who he really was and, sort of, why he had sought her out. To hurt Thor. Or himself. Or both, with her just a pawn in the game. And though she hadn’t understood it at the time, he’d more or less come out and admitted it and said he couldn’t stop himself.

She decided not to tell Thor about that. At least, not just now.

When Thor murmured his brother’s name, he sounded like he was in shock. Like he couldn’t really believe. Jane continued to hold his hand and later fetched a fresh box of tissues.

And the storm outside did not stop for hours.


End file.
